The epistle may be in grave danger of getting extinct. More than the book and the newspaper, which are anyway under threat from the ubiquitous television, the habit of writing letters is in the process of getting antiquated. Or is it?
“Has writing letters become a tertiary literary activity?” asks eminent author and retired politician (by his own admission) K. Natwar Singh in the “Prefatory Note” of his latest book, “Yours Sincerely”. The book, a unique collection of letters stringing a series of eminent personalities, was released by Mr. Singh, the former External Affairs Minister, at the Rupa book exhibition here this past weekend.
“The e-mail, the fax machine, the mobile phone are the enemies of the art and craft of letter-writing. The SMS has invented a pidgin, linguistic shorthand. This is an assault on the refinement of language,” says Mr. Singh, obviously a strong supporter of the activity. Not only writing letters but also preserving them has become a thing of the past, he laments.
“Our indifference to history and historical process spills over to not preserving letters. I would go so far as to say that our disregard for history is not so much an activity as a whole philosophy. It is because so much of our history is not overtly inspiring,” Mr. Singh argues. He mentions the names of Jawaharlal Nehru (“A Bunch of Old Letters”, 1960), Mahatma Gandhi and Lord Curzon, Viceroy of India, as those who wrote and preserved their letters.
“I had the good sense to preserve these letters. Many of my distinguished correspondents I met in my twenties. I was both delighted and genuinely grateful,” Mr. Singh elaborates.
The present collection contains letters from people as varied as Lord Mountbatten, Indira Gandhi, Mulk Raj Anand, Dom Moraes, M. F. Husain, Vijaylakshmi Pandit, Morarji Desai, Rajiv Gandhi and the Dalai Lama.
One of the letters, written to him by former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi on May 2, 1972, has an indirect reference to the “Nehru dynasty” (inverted commas not Mr. Singh’s).
“The great thing about the Nehru family is not the emergence of two or three famous individuals but that the large number of cousins were all distinctive in one way or another. Not only were most of them formidable characters, but the women they married also were strong personalities,” the letter said.
It would perhaps be interesting to know what Indira Gandhi thought about her younger son Sanjay Gandhi’s bride Maneka Gandhi soon after their marriage in 1974. “The marriage was quiet but dignified and elegant. Maneka is a delightful girl, gay and joyous,” she wrote on October 13.
There are a few letters in the volume with the epigraph “Personal/Confidential” and one of them from Indira Gandhi carries a comment on Subramanian Swamy and the Pokhran nuclear test. “I am not surprised that Subramanian Swamy is being welcomed in England. His sort would be! In India he has no influence whatsoever in his own party. He has not been a success in Parliament and there are often sniggers when he gets up. He seems to have a complex of some kind and is aggressive in a defensive way if you know what I mean. He is a strong advocate of the Atom Bomb. He has had a longstanding quarrel with our Atomic Scientists—with Vikram Sarabhai and now Sethna. His main criticism was that we were quite incapable of serious work with Atomic Energy! After our experiment in Pokhran, his first reaction was that the news was not probably true….”
